Tokyo: In a breakthrough innovation, scientists in Japan have constructed the world’s first wooden satellite, which was launched into space on Tuesday.
Named LignoSat, which means ‘wood’ in Latin, the satellite will be flown on a SpaceX mission to the International Space Station and later released into orbit about 400 km (250 miles) above the Earth.
Elucidating the aim of the latest innovation, Takao Doi, an astronaut who has flown on the Space Shuttle and studies human space activities at Kyoto University said, “With timber, a material we can produce by ourselves, we will be able to build houses, live and work in space forever.”
Doi’s team, which has a 50-year plan of planting trees and building wooden houses on the moon and Mars, decided to construct a NASA-certified wooden satellite to prove that wood is a “space-grade material.”
“Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood. A wooden satellite should be feasible, too,” said Kyoto University Forest science professor Koji Murata.
Murata further stated that since there is no water or oxygen in space to rot or burn wood, it is more durable there than on Earth.
After a 10-month experiment at the International Space Station, the researchers found that honoki, a magnolia tree native in Japan, which is traditionally used for sword sheaths, is most suitable for making spacecrafts.
LignoSat is made of honoki, using a traditional Japanese crafts technique without screws or glue.
The researchers further stressed that there is no harmful impact of a wooden satellite on the environment.
While the wooden satellites would only burn up creating less pollution, the conventional metal satellites generate aluminium oxide particles during re-entry, thereby adding on to the space debris.
Doi added that if wooden satellites take off as planned, metal satellites could be banned in future, reported Reuters.
“Metal satellites might be banned in the future. If we can prove our first wooden satellite works, we want to pitch it to Elon Musk’s SpaceX,” said Doi.
Kenji Kariya, a manager at Sumitomo Forestry Tsukuba Research Institute said, “It may seem outdated, but wood is actually cutting-edge technology as civilisation heads to the moon and Mars. Expansion to space could invigorate the timber industry.”